This book is a full portrait of a complicated personality. Caldwell's unpredictability, harsh mood swings, and extramarital affairs are paralleled with instances of warmth, gentleness and generosity. A shy man bounds from a canvas alive with controversy. This book also is an attempt to better understand an American storyteller.

  William Faulkner once ranked Erskine Caldwell among America's five most promising novelists. Thomas Wolfe was given the lead, followed by Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Caldwell and Ernest Hemingway. His reputation soared from 1934 to 1944 and then nose-dived. By the end of World War II, critics shunned him, though he had a huge following for several more years.

  Inexpensive editions of Caldwell's books on circular "Spin It" racks in drugstores and corner groceries became a distribution sensation. His paperback publisher, New American  Library, proclaimed him to be "The World's Best-Selling Author!" It was more than a buzzword gathering to decorate eye-teasing jackets—only the Bible was ahead in sales. His books have sold 80 million copies in forty-three languages, and in spite of numbers, Erskine Caldwell is a forgotten American writer.

   There were 25 novels, 150 short stories, 12 nonfiction collections, and even 2 books for young readers. The novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre endured (they sometimes can be found in bookstores), and many of Caldwell's short stories were consummate achievements.

How people saw Lawrence depended on where they stood on the social or intellectual level. A chameleon in reverse, taking on the opposite coloring of his environment, he stands out starkly in the many books written by articulate friends.

Now we hear a new voice. Naturally eloquent and with tactile recall, one of Lawrence's own characters speaks to us. Stanley Hocking, the farm boy in "The Nightmare" chapter of Lawrence's novel Kangaroo vividly describes that crucial time in Cornwall from March 1916 to October 1917 when Lawrence was reconsidering many of his inner values and external relationships. His marriage was in trouble, he felt tormented by the mass patriotism around him, and he was uncertain of his sexual preferences as he wandered ever closer to a culmination with the handsome young farmer, William Henry Hocking.

The book merges Stanley Hocking's remembrance of physical events with Lawrence's need to recall emotional events: the desire to find the past in the present was always strong in him. Lawrence delights in blending with the spirited Cornish farm family -- reliving his beginnings in the Midlands. His feelings run parallel to that time. So do the reactions of the women who love him: his mother then; his wife, Frieda, now.

Were the couple's famous fights caused by a struggle for dominance, class difference, or a mutual need for emotional upheaval? The farm people see a different Frieda than do Lawrence's intellectual friends. "She's more of a lady than he is." was an innocently astute remark from one of Stanley's sisters.

But the world intrudes. Submarines sink British ships, some in view of Lawrence's cottage, and people begin to talk. This strange, bearded man with his German, red-stockinged wife and his immoral, unpatriotic books was surely betraying his country. Now, added to the couple's hatred of the war, come suspicion and surveillance, and finally, shockingly, expulsion.
 

Guardian angels,
 hauntings, 
Bigfoot sightings,

witchcraft,

poltergeists,
 ESP, 
alien abductions, 
 UFO's,
 out-of-
body experience, 

psychics,
 dowsing
 and exorcism 
- these are only a few of
the intriguing
adventures covered in this book.


Mainers from Kittery to Fort Kent have stepped forward to reveal
their encounters - many of them incredible and some frightening.



Readers will find this book the trip of a lifetime as bizarre
incidents leap to  the foreground and the pages gallop out of sight.


Here is a world where participants are instantly challenged to make
sense out of what seems real, or what may be remnants from the glow 
of storytelling -  you decide .